Crush

Chapter Twenty-Six Getting to Lima

Twenty-Six

Getting to Lima

“Baby fantasies aren’t always about literal babies!” Veronica said. “They can be about anything creative. You have a book coming out. Focus on that, not on getting dangerously pregnant.”

Publishing a new book should have been thrilling, and I enjoyed some parts of it. At my book party I hugged my ninety-year-old neighbors and carried around a friend’s baby. I saw people from every place I’d ever worked. And yet all of it provided only a momentary distraction from the drive to see David again as soon as possible.

When a young photographer came to take my picture for a profile connected to the book, she kept calling out instructions for how to pose: “Casual gal! Girl boss! Broken doll! Serious gal! Broken girl boss doll in corner!”

“ Broken girl boss doll in corner ?” I said, laughing.

“Broken girl boss doll in corner with a secret !” she said.

I marveled at the pictures when I saw them a couple of weeks later in a newspaper. I looked like I had a secret.

I’d always loved book tours, and I was more grateful than ever to have an excuse to travel. I bought stacks of books and mailed them home. I wore dresses and heels and got manicures in bright colors. At one bookstore in the Midwest a young woman who’d already read the book said, “The way you talked about writing made me feel permission to say what I wanted to say without waiting for someone else to tell me it was okay.”

“Is there a question there?” the moderator said protectively.

“Yes,” I said, “a good question: What do we let ourselves have ?”

At every event I did, I felt fully present. If attendance was low I became King Henry on St. Crispin’s Day: “We few, we happy few.” I wanted everyone to feel glad they’d come, like they were in on a glorious experience that everyone else would be sorry to have missed. The important thing was not to be like the teacher at Nate’s school who yelled—at the end of a holiday show her creative direction had turned into a three-hour slog—“I guess let’s do the last number even though there’s no one here !” We parents who’d stuck it out looked at one another, all of us feeling like fools for not slipping out with the others during the interminable candy cane tap dance.

Every day I seemed to have another meaningful exchange with a stranger. At one outdoor event at a farmers market I signed fifty books with the wrong date, but no one seemed to care. During that reading a funeral procession passed by us, complete with bagpipes. As I browsed a library’s ground-floor bookshop I heard a man on his way to the front door say something unintelligible.

“Sorry, what was that?” a security guard asked him.

“I was talking to God ,” the guy said.

“Ah, okay,” said the guard.

He looked around to see if anyone else had heard that and only I had. We smiled at each other. Yes, of course. How silly of the guard not to have known that God, not he, was being addressed.

I stared out the windows of planes, trains, and cars, listening to the playlists David and I had made together. I watched clouds, industrial parks, and water speed by, the sun rise and set.

On a flight to a tour stop where I’d finally see David after what felt like a very long time, I started crying. That was all I did anymore the second I was alone. I had become a weeping prophet, only with no prophecy. I kept crying as the crew prepared for takeoff. I stared out the window, hoping the man in my row wouldn’t notice and ask what was wrong. I imagined saying, “I’m married but in love with someone else who I haven’t seen in weeks. My father is sick. My son is leaving soon for college. The Van Morrison song ‘Hungry for Your Love’ just came on in my headphones. And once I start crying these days it’s really hard to stop.”

Then a woman behind me started crying loudly enough to get the stewardess’s attention.

“What’s wrong, honey?” the flight attendant said, leaning into her row.

I didn’t hear the words, just the universal sounds of frustration and loss.

“Don’t you worry,” the stewardess said in a soothing voice. “We’ll get you to Lima.”

I inhaled my neighbor’s consolation the same way a character in Ooka the Wise , a book I read Nate when he was little, absorbs the smells from a neighboring tea shop to vicariously flavor his plain rice. The tenderness wasn’t meant for me, but I’d take it. I stopped crying.

My phone filled with reviews and people reaching out to invite me to parties. One night in Nashville out for dinner with a group of writers, we got drunk on wine and sang “Frank Mills” from Hair at full volume from start to finish. At any time before that, I’d have been afraid of making a spectacle of myself. But I no longer cared what people thought about my subpar singing voice or about my love life. My unconventional marriage just made space for this other man, and for whatever Paul had going on. Not much so far, from what I could tell, but he seemed to be working to change that.

One night when I was doing a talk in Texas he made plans to have dinner with— And really , I thought, of all the women on earth? —Sarah, his not-just-emotional affair partner. After the event, I went out with a friend. I resolved to be fully present and not to check my phone to see what was happening back home.

I gave my dinner companion a rough sketch of what was going on.

“Oh! That’s so hard!” she said with a clucking, maternal sympathy I found deeply lovable. “When I fell in love with my husband, I was so relieved I didn’t ever have to do that again.” She made the gesture of a lid clapping down on a jar.

“I love that you are content!” I said, trying to sound the way I felt, which was impressed, and not the way I could tell it came off, which was condescending. “I used to be like that.”

She smiled, and said, “I hope it’s okay if I tell you this: as you’re talking about your husband I keep hearing you protecting him. And honestly, you’re not being ‘good’ right now; you’re being self-sacrificing, which is the opposite of real goodness. Part of me is rooting for you to surrender not only to love but also to the chaos of love. I want you to be selfish, to think about your own needs, to embrace getting what you want.

“And what interests me is that what you’re talking about isn’t having sex with multiple people, which anyone could do,” she said. “Or having a secret emotional or sexual affair, which so many people do with various outcomes. What you’re doing is honestly loving more than one person for an extended period of time, which is actually really unusual. I’ll be curious to see how you pull it off. It seems fragile.”

“Yes, it could blow up at any moment,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But so could anything.”